Franklincountyvapatriots

By Dennis Mullin

VACUOUS RHETORIC: President Obama finally cut short his controversial vacation – forced to leave the luxury of Martha’s Vineyard for the mean unemployment-strewn streets of America by a hurricane. Fortunately he had a fleet of planes standing by so his family could fly back the very next day in splendid privacy. Now he has time to write yet another speech about the near 10 percent unemployment-rate, the national bankruptcy and a federal government run wild.

Even his most ardent supporters admit that Obama is again (as is his wont), absent-mindedly moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Most analysts expect his upcoming job creation scheme, to include more of the same:  more pork barrel “stimulus” spending on “infrastructure” work for the bureaucratic legions he has created; more class- warfare attacks on his rich friends now that he has left their vacation retreats; more blaming of the Republicans, the Tea Party, Japanese and Arabs for his inadequacies – and more of the vacuous rhetoric that has become his trade mark. A new poll by CNN and ORC International finds that 27 percent of Democrats would like to see their party nominate a candidate other than Barack Obama for president in 2012

OUTRAGES: Under Obama the ridiculous has virtually become the norm. Forbes has a list of kid’s lemonade stands the feds have closed in recent weeks. The EPA has 770 inspectors policing the Midwest against famers who create dust when they plow. The ATF is giving the Mexican drug cartels free guns to shoot American agents. ObamaCare will give free medical support to illegal immigrants, who technically aren’t even here. Attorney General Holder wants to empty Guantanamo onto your street, and sounds like the next up will be a Supreme Court seat reserved for al Qaeda. NY Mayor Bloomberg is banning all clergy from 9/11 commemorations but supports the building of a mosque across the street. Now an Idaho man faces serious prison time or fines for shooting a Grizzly Bear which he found in his yard trying to eat his kids. And Obama dreams on – of buying four more years with 25 million out of work on his watch. As he cheerfully destroys the country, the Canadians and Mexicans are going to start building walls soon to keep us in.

BAD REVIEWS: The reviews and the data to back them up are overwhelming. This from former Congressman and Governor, Pete Du Pont who writes: “The Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. debt is the latest fruit of the Obama administration's big-government policies. Ask Americans how the country is doing, and the response is a vote of no confidence. In August 2009, 34% of likely voters said the country was headed in the right direction. A month ago that proportion had declined to 25%, and last week only 16% thought so. Rasmussen's mid-August poll found that 4% of adults rate the economy as good or excellent, and 66% think we are doing poorly.”

“Just before his election as president, Barack Obama declared that `we are five days from fundamentally transforming America.’ He has made good on that promise. Huge increases in federal spending—up 28% in just three years—were the beginning. Putting health care—17% of the American economy—under Washington's control was next. Government control of business is expanding too: 379 new government business rules were added in July alone, according to Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming. Federal government debt held by the public rose from $6 trillion (40% of GDP) in 2008 to $9 trillion (62%) in 2010, The Congressional Budget Office says it could reach 200% by 2037, if the economy doesn't collapse first.”

MOUNTAINS OF DEBET: “Mr. Obama's original budget for fiscal 2012 would have more than doubled the debt held by the public, from 2010's $9 trillion to $19 trillion in 2021. Politico reports that by the 2013 inauguration, the government will have taken on addition debt to the tune of "$22,500 for every man, woman, and child in the nation" during Mr. Obama's tenure. Some 45 million Americans, or 1 in 7, receive food stamps, up from less than 30 million a few years ago. Finally, in the previous two years our annual economic growth after inflation has averaged only 1.3% annually, just about half our past 10-year average of 2.5%. In the first half of this year, it was running at an annual rate of 0.8%.” The chorus goes on and on. In its first 26 months, reports The Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules that will cost the private sector $40 billion.

JOBS, JOBS: By the government's own numbers, small businesses have created 64 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years. In fact, that understates the role of small business, since the vast majority of America's medium-sized and large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated piles of horseradish at home, using his mother's recipe, and sold the bottled product door-to-door in Sharpsburg out of a wheelbarrow. Yet since Obama took office, employment at federal regulatory agencies has jumped 13 percent while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent.

Second, 39 percent of small-business owners said in a Chamber of Commerce survey in July that ObamaCare was either their greatest or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Dennis Lockhart, concurs, stating that "prominent" among the obstacles to hiring is the "lack of clarity about the cost implications" of ObamaCare.  Americans' opinion of ObamaCare has reached an all-time post-passage low according to the Kaiser Health Tracking poll. Only 39% of those surveyed have a favorable view of the law, two points below the previous nadir of 41% first set in May 2010. Forty-four percent of Americans have an unfavorable view.

STRONG COMMENTS: "We've frequently heard strong comments," reported Lockhart, "to the effect of, 'My company won't hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.'" Additionally, 84 percent of small business owners in the survey said the economy is on the wrong track, 79 percent view the current regulatory environment as unreasonable, and 79 percent believe Washington should get out of the way of small business, rather than offering a helping hand (14 percent).

BOTTOM LINE: What's required from Obama is a complete about-face, the shelving of his flawed economic philosophy and a reversal of his counterproductive policy prescriptions. But judging from his constant rhetoric about class warfare and the super-rich that seems impossible His National Labor Relations Board is suing Boeing for building a factory in a right to work state. He has already just about given Government Motors (GM) to the UAW -- because he depends so heavily on union funds for reelection. He has stopped deporting illegal immigrants to stop the tailspin in Hispanic support. Even blacks are growing dispirited with the lack of jobs.

CLUELESS: Mort Zuckerman adds, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Obama seems unable to get a firm grip on the toughest issue facing his presidency and the country -- the economy. He now asserts he is going to "pivot" to jobs. Now we pivot to jobs? When there are already 25 million Americans who are either unemployed or cannot find full-time work? Does this president not appreciate what is going on?” (The New York Times says if you count the underemployed and those that have given up it is closer to 20 percent).

“Fewer Americans are working full-time today than when Mr. Obama took office. We have lost over 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone, and long-term unemployment is at a post-World War II high. The public's faith in his ability to deal with the economy has plunged. As Doyle McManus of the L.A. Times put it, `Can this president persuade voters to let him keep his job when so many have lost theirs?’ Even Jimmy Carter didn't plumb the depths of national dissatisfaction revealed in the stunning Gallup poll taken Aug. 11-13. The president's approval rating was only 39% with a mere 26% approving of his handling of the economy.”

“Meanwhile, everyone in the business world is pleading for some kind of adult supervision that includes a long-term fiscal plan that addresses our ballooning debt. They are desperate for strong leadership and feel that all we are getting out of Washington is a lot of noise as Democrats and Republicans blame one another.”

WALKING DISASTER: Obama is turning into a walking disaster and nobody has ever been re-elected with such an appalling economic record. That is most reflected in the near hysteria that has erupted in “progressive” and the leftwing lapdog media circles over the entry into the race of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Here is what the predictable pseudo-intellectual; foolishly liberally-blind New Republic had to say: “What Rick Perry has achieved in his inaugural strut on the political stage is unprecedented in the annals of modern conservative history from Barry Goldwater to Sarah Palin. It is not just that the Texas governor has dominated the news cycle, overshadowed the Iowa Straw Poll, vaulted over every GOP contender except Mitt Romney in the national polls, and reduced Karl Rove to sputtering frustration. All that is admittedly impressive for a first-time candidate whose name was familiar to only half of Republican voters just a few weeks ago.”

PERRY LETHAL: “But what sets Perry apart and earns him his niche in the far right corner of Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with the gyrations of the 2012 campaign. Indeed, Perry is not only a presidential candidate, but also a cowboy-booted sociological experiment. It is almost as if Perry’s political persona was constructed by bundling together all the fears and phantoms in the left-wing anxiety closet. Since the hysteria of the 1950s Red Scare, no Republican figure has matched Perry in his God-given ability to give liberals the heebie-jeebies. Others can rival the governor’s disdain for academic achievement (Palin), his cross-on-the-sleeve religiosity (Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee), and his antipathy to Social Security and Medicare (Paul Ryan and Barry Goldwater). But never before has a top-tier presidential candidate embodied the whole lethal package—and more.”

Lethal package – at a time when surveys show that due to the two-years of unemployment compensation and a system so hostile to investment that Obama has created an entire generation that will never reenter the workforce. And the 40 percent of businesses that say they will cancel health insurance and pay the fines rather than comply with new federal mandates, or join the 1,000s of Obama campaign donors that have been granted waivers from the regulations to come from the 150-plus new agencies Obama creates in his health care abomination.

Or the polls that show while those who consider themselves liberals runs in the teens, and conservatives poll 60 percent and up; California is hemorrhaging population and loosing congressional seats for the first time ever and people are moving in mass to conservative job creating states – lethal indeed.